How to make renovate parse a (kinda) different structure of package.json

[abruzzi]

Hi renovate

I have an issue (not a common usage to be honest) about how to config renovate to detect dependencies defined in a template file other than package.json.

In create-react-app you can use template to generate a new project (https://create-react-app.dev/docs/custom-templates/), it's using template.json as a template and will be merged to the generated package.json at runtime.

I can tell renovate to check the file by saying this:

{
  "extends": ["config:base"],
  "npm": {
    "fileMatch": ["(^|/)template.json$"]
  },
}

which is fine, but the structure in template.json I believe not quite align with the structure that renovate is expecting:

{
    "package": {
      "dependencies": {
         /**/
      },
      "eslintConfig": {
        "extends": ["react-app", "react-app/jest"]
      }
    }
  }

note there is a package section, and then dependencies under it.

So I'd like to ask is there a way to let renovate be aware of this structure or should I raise a feature request instead?

Also I noted that renovate does support the old format like the one defined here (https://github.com/cypress-io/cra-template-cypress/blob/master/template.json) in cypress-io (as you can see there is no package section in the file, which is the old format).

[viceice]

I think your only way is to use a regex manager

https://docs.renovatebot.com/configuration-options/#regexmanagers

[abruzzi]

Hi @viceice

Thanks for replying, and regexManager worked:

  "regexManagers": [
    {
      "fileMatch": ["^template.json$"],
      "matchStringsStrategy": "recursive",
      "matchStrings": [
        "\"dependencies\":\\s*\\{[^}]*}",
        "\"(?<depName>.*)\"[^\"]*:\\s*\"(?<currentValue>.*)\""
      ],
      "datasourceTemplate": "npm"
    }
  ],

Thank you!